YMMV / Banjo-Tooie

• Accidental Innuendo: It's possible for Banjo to use Snooze Pack while he already has someone scooped up with Taxi Pack, meaning Banjo can effectively sleep with anybody he's picked up. ...Including Groggy.
• Awesome Music: See here.
• Best Level Ever: Witchyworld for the interesting level premise and variety it brings, Jolly Roger's Lagoon being a water level done correctly coupled with the wonderful submarine transformation, and the gloriously difficult Hailfire Peaks.
• Best Boss Ever: The Final Boss against Grunty piloting the Hag 1 is considered one of the best final bosses Rare has ever created despite its sheer length and difficulty due to its wide variety of attacks, multiple distinct phases, the excellent Boss Banter from Grunty, Awesome Music, and the sheer awesomeness that comes from fighting a giant drill tank piloted by a skeletal witch.
• Breather Boss: Old King Coal roams around the arena with brief pauses to heat up the room to make 90% of the arena hazardous while the fumes drain your oxygen, but you're safe in the higher platforms set across the arena and he is very susceptible to being sniped by eggs (especially Ice Eggs, which do more damage than usual, or Grenade Eggs). The heat mechanic will hardly be a threat most of the time, because not only will he stop heating the room once your oxygen meter gets low enough, but you can double said meter before the fight by saving Banjo's fish with the Bill Drill. Given that Old King Coal guards Chuffy, a train that is necessary to get inside Grunty Industries without exploiting bugs, the easiness of his fight is likely intentional.
• Breather Level: Mingy Jongo and Canary Mary notwithstanding, Cloud Cuckooland is nowhere near as confusing or difficult as the previous two levels.
• Contested Sequel: While rarely seen as a bad game, how the game stacks up to the first game is hotly debated. Some people dislike the slower pacing, greatly increased world size, greater complexity assigned to each Jiggy, large amounts of backtracking, and the Darker and Edgier tone and prefer the original as a result. Others see Banjo Tooie as an Even Better Sequel for those exact reasons, as well as adding a lot more bosses, completely reworking the way Notes work so they no longer wall off progress, and a surprisingly strong multiplayer mode. Other camps do consider Tooie a bad game outright; speedrunners in particular tend to dislike how difficult it is to completely clear each world on the first try.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Visiting Bottles' family early on absolutely drips with Black Comedy due to Banjo and Kazooie knowing that Bottles is dead while his family does not. Of particular note is Kazooie asking Bottles' son if he happens to have any replacements for the upcoming kickball tournament.
• Difficulty Spike: The second world, Glitter Gulch Mine, is considerably tougher than the first world due to being much more labyrinthine in design, more dangerous enemies, and really starts to demonstrate that you will need to go between multiple worlds to get some Jiggies.
• Disappointing Last Level: Cauldron Keep is a very small level with no Jiggies, and it only serves to host one last fight with Klungo, the climactic quiz show and final boss. Concept art shows that Cauldron Keep was once planned to be a full world, but Rare simply ran out of time and was forced to scrap the majority of the level.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mr. Patch is probably the most popular boss in the game due to being a textbook example of the game's humor, having one of the most enjoyable fights in the series, and his catchy battle theme.
  • Jolly Roger is a very popular character for his Camp Gay personality, overall helpfulness to Banjo and Kazooie, and his tavern containing some of the most jarring innuendos possible, making him (along with Mr. Fit) one of the few minor characters to return for Nuts & Bolts with an expanded role.
  • Chilli Billi and Chilly Willy are two more of the most popular bosses. For one thing, they're two boss fights instead of one. Said boss fights are also quite enjoyable. They have some of the most impressive visual effects on the N64. Also, THEY'RE GIANT FREAKING DRAGONS.
  • Despite the level he appears in being widely considered one of the hardest levels of the game, Weldar has quite a few fans and fanart, due in part to his design, his Punch-Clock Villain status, and providing quite a few funny lines.
  • Big Al and Salty Joe, the Witchyworld employees who sell hamburgers and fries respectively, are quite beloved because of their hilarious dialogue, over-the-top bad hygiene and manners, and being overall good indicators on how decayed the amusement park really is.
• Fair for Its Day: These days, Jolly Roger and Merry Maggie Malpass would be seen as stereotypical depictions of homosexual and transgender people respectively, with Jolly being Camp Gay and Maggie being a Gonky Femme, but for being depictions of LGBTQIA+ people at the start of the Turn of the Millennium, they're reasonably tactful, with the two showing nothing but kindness to Banjo and Kazooie for their help, and being very hard workers who have good chemistry as the barkeeps of the tavern. Banjo and Kazooie are also shown to be accepting toward them as they treat them normally and Kazooie doesn't make any cracks about their relationship. They were also progressive for the time period they were created in, as British media was often frowned upon when including LGBTQIA+ characters during the late 90s and early 2000s, resulting in many characters of the sort not being as blatant in their sexualities and identities as Jolly and Maggie are.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Fallproof and Honeyback Cheato Codes. Once you unlock them by giving Cheato enough pages, the game and any remaining boss fights become a breeze, as Banjo and Kazooie will take no damage from falls (aside from falling into a bottomless pit) with the former code, and the latter code makes it so that Banjo is constantly regenerating his health, making him nigh unkillable.
  • The Clockwork Kazooie egg is one the five egg types and easily the most useful among them. Once fired, it spawns a tiny mechanized Kazooie that can be detonated for a powerful explosion and, more importantly, can pick up items. That includes Jiggies and Jinjos, meaning that by simply firing a Clockwork Kazooie at a hard to reach place, you can skip doing either a tough platforming section or a tricky puzzle. True, it's not going to solve every problem (minigames among them), but it deals with more than enough of them. It also has the problem that you cannot move while using this item, so make sure you will be safe before firing an egg, but once you do, the egg can easily deal with most of your problems. Speedruns use the item heavily, and even in casual playthroughs knowledge of its power is enough to break through multiple challenges.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Hotheads like to swoop in on their flying carpets at inopportune moments, often knocking unfortunate players off ledges, and their airborne nature makes them difficult to hit. Their annoying laugh just adds insult to injury.
  • The Minjos. While there is a surefire way to tell when a Jinjo is actually a Minjo (fire an egg at 'em: it'll pass right through the Jinjo but hurt the Minjo), it's a bit of a pain to go through the process with every one you come across, and if you decide not to bother, they'll be an even bigger pain thanks to their speed, aggression, resilience, and immunity to the roll that could help you against all the above.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Banjo can double-jump when he's going solo by swinging his backpack in mid-air and then jumping again. This move allows for minor Sequence Breaking by reaching otherwise inaccessible platforms without outside help.
  • Clockwork Eggs are very glitchy; since they don't actually start existing until their eggs hatch, they can be used to clip through very small gaps in walls (like the almost nonexistent gap between a window and the wall) to get to Jiggies or Cheato Pages the player shouldn't be able to normally reach so easily. Not only that, Clockwork Kazooies don't activate aggro from enemies so they can also be used to bypass obstacles that typically force Banjo and Kazooie back when they get close to it.
  • Because of how hitboxes were coded in this game, it is possible to stun-lock Mingy Jongo with Dragon Kazooie's fire breath simply by never letting go of the button when it connects.
  • Canary Mary's Cheato Page race in Cloud Cuckooland is incredibly easy if exploited. By trailing behind her the entire race, she never increases her speed due to her AI being programmed to rubber band when getting in front of her, so by staying behind her, she stays at a consistent speed, and it's very easy to blaze ahead of her at the last stretch, resulting in a cakewalk of a win.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Grunty's quiz show being called the "Tower of Tragedy", considering the 9/11 attacks took place less than a year after the game's release.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Styracosaurus kid is shown to have a taste for meat despite being a herbivorous dinosaur. Not only do paleontologists now believe ceratopsians might have been partially-omnivorous, but a Styracosaurus was chosen for paleoartist Mark Witton's painting portraying this behavior.
  • One of the Styracosaurus kids is named Scrat.
  • When Mr. Patch inflates himself, Kazooie says "I suppose you think you're clever, don't you?"
  • This wouldn't be the last time a location is named Cloud Cuckoo Land.
• Jerkass Woobie: Klungo is an unrepentant villain who makes it clear that he doesn't regret anything he did while working for Grunty, but the sheer amount of physical abuse she put him through makes you feel more than a little sorry for the big guy. Sure enough, it finally catches up with Klungo and he outright quits working for her. The next time we see him in Nuts & Bolts, he's much happier.
• Moral Event Horizon: If her murder of Bottles, plan to suck out the island's life-force, familicide of the Grey Jinjos and constant beatings of Klungo weren't bad enough, Gruntilda crosses the line when she kills her own sisters for losing the Tower of Tragedy Quiz Game Show. The same sisters that saved her from being trapped under the boulder at the beginning of the game.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Bullion Bill's joyous "woo-hoo" when Dilberta is returned to him.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The Clinkers in Grunty Industries. In spite of their names, they're giant, liquid piles of poop that cover the ventilation systems, and also consistently make farting noises. This alone is gross enough, but failing to kill them all results in the sewers becoming clogged in a brown gas that not only covers the screen, but causes Banjo and Kazooie to start choking to their deaths.
  • Much like Loggo from the last game, Guffo the bean can's dialogue is fart sounds.
  • At one point in Grunty's Industries, you need to unclog Loggo's drain with a Bill Drill, so shoving Kazooie face-first into a clogged toilet for an extended time.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The game is harder than the original game to begin with, but the toughest challenge in the game is unanimously considered to be the rematch races against Canary Mary in Cloud Cuckooland, especially the second (but mercifully optional) one, due to the Button Mashing nature of it and Mary exploiting some brutal Rubber-Band A.I.. The second race introduces some truly nasty Fake Difficulty by having Mary automatically rocket to the finish line near the end, no matter how good or bad you're playing.
  • The boss Replay Mode also makes the fights harder than they are in the actual game, especially the Hag-1 fight. You only have five honeycombs in it, when in the actual game you would more than likely have increased your health bar beyond that by the later fights.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In Kazooie, Banjo's claw swipes were a very weak attack everyone used and disliked, because it was easy to use even by accident. For Tooie, the devs took a good, hard look at the controls, cut the claws altogether and gave its move spot to the rat-a-tat rap instead (replaced by the fire breath attack when Kazooie is turned into a dragon), and there was much rejoicing.
• The Scrappy: Very few fans are willing to defend the alien family. They feel rather out of place even in a Cloudcuckooland like the Isle O' Hags, but they're also thoroughly unpleasant Ungrateful Bastards who not only refuse to thank Mumbo for reviving the dad, but also attempt to destroy the Earth just because Banjo, Kazooie, and Mumbo took too long finding their kids. Their personalities are also rather stale compared to the myriad of silly characters found throughout the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Breegull Blaster. While Rare has found success with First-Person Shooters in the past, its integration into Tooie feels rather jarring, and Gameplay Roulette aside, you're often found using it in extremely tight corridors and subjected to infinitely respawning enemies, making the Breegull Blaster feel more like a chore than a small distraction.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: You can complete Jolly Roger's Lagoon without using Mumbo to oxygenate the water first, which is what many speedrunners end up doing. If that's too easy for you, try doing it without the doubled Oxygen Meter provided in Spiral Mountain. To give an idea of how challenging that is, you can just barely swim all the way from the lagoon's surface to the building where Jamjars teaches you the Talon Torpedo move, and that's if you can avoid taking damage from the eels inside.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Banjo-Tooie is a lot more challenging than its predecessor. The levels are larger and more complex (to the point that warp pads are introduced), and the Jiggies are harder to find, as there is almost none out in plain sight like in the previous game's earlier stages. The bosses are more plentiful and more difficult overall, including the infamous Weldar of Grunty Industries. It is worth noting, however, that Rare did show some mercy by removing some of Kazooie's more irritating components, such as giving the player infinite lives this time around and completely retooling how the collection of Musical Notes works.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The game has an opening act that takes at minimum a half hour to complete before you can enter Mayahem Temple due to the prolonged length of the cutscenes, but skipping them trims down the length significantly.
• Spiritual Adaptation: This is the closest thing the Nintendo 64 ever got to a Metroid game, since its open-ended structure with a backtrack focus, gate-heavy structure, and emphasis on collecting new moves and items to advance is very much in vogue with the Metroidvania style of gameplay.
• Squick: Receiving both prizes from Canary Mary. The Jiggy was stuck under her wing for days, and the Cheato page was wedged in... somewhere. Kazooie is rightfully disgusted when Mary tells them where they've been.
• That One Boss:
  • If you don't manage to get used to the airborne shooting controls, Mr. Patch will murder you.
  • Lord Woo Fak Fak is much harder if you're not transformed into a submarine due to Banjo being too slow to swim around him and his attacks properly, even with the fast swimming ability you learn from his goldfish. That's why he ends up being the toughest battle in the Boss Rush mode, since using Banjo is obligatory.
  • Weldar, the boss battle of Grunty Industries. While it only takes six flammable (Fire, Grenade or Clockwork) Eggs to bring him down, he has a very powerful attack at his disposal that can deplete Banjo's life energy to just one honeycomb, and also electrifies the floor in the second half of the fight, making it much harder to outrun his stomp attack, while also giving you far less time to shoot an egg into his mouth.
  • Mingy Jongo is equipped with a homing attack that can quickly whittle down your health, and he loves to teleport out of harm's way. As he takes damage his attacks and teleportation intensify, until his attacks are almost making 90-degree turns to catch you, ensuring that you will miss your chance at hitting him and have to go through another attack cycle. Also, he starts the fight by landing a cheap shot on you, and you will need all of your hitpoints in this fight.
• That One Level:
  • Terrydactyland due to its large size and having that painfully long sidequest with the Styracosaurus. The muddy quicksand also makes it hard to explore.
  • Grunty Industries. It's by far the most complex level in the entire game, even though it's only the sixth out of eight. Just getting to the level requires extra effort, since the entrance to the building is closed and has to be opened from inside. Banjo and Kazooie have to do a lot of searching around and messing with puzzle elements to make a dent in the level's defences. In addition, Humba's Washing Machine spell is the worst out of all her transformation spells: it's hard to control, and it's hard to shoot with. On that note, while the first couple of FPS levels in Banjo-Tooie aren't too bad (though Ordnance Storage can be somewhat overwhelming to newcomers due to its confusing layout) and the FPS minigame in Terrydactyland is very fun, Clinker's Cavern has a very sharp spike in difficulty due to its maze like layout combined with a very tight time limit for you to clear out all of the Clinkers.
  • Hailfire Peaks would've probably been a fine level by itself if the fire side wasn't a literal hell to navigate through. The paths are narrow, the enemies are annoying and lava covers 80% of the level. In addition, until you take out the bosses, you'll be getting pelted with fireballs and blasts of ice the entire time.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Mayahem Temple is an easy level, but it's home to two Jiggies that involve precise tiptoeing to get, with even the slightest slip-up forcing you to start them over, so both demand a lot of precision and patience. Though if a player desires, both of these challenges can be bypassed with the Clockwork Eggs if you're willing to wait to get them.
  • Jolly Roger's Lagoon has the challenge where you have to protect Chris P. Bacon from a colony of fish as he takes photos. While using the Homing Egg cheat and Grenade Eggs can make it slightly easier, the fish randomly spawn from all angles and come fast, and even one bite at Chris will force him to start over, leaving little room for error.
  • The Styracosaurus family sidequest in Terrydactyland is one of the most exasperating fetch quests in the game, requiring the use of the Chuffy Train to bring back a member from Witchyworld and to take another to Isle O' Hags so Mumbo can heal him, and will push your patience to its limits; and since it's still one sidequest, the reward is only one Jiggy (even Kazooie complains that it's not sufficiently rewarding).
  • Canary Mary's Cloud Cuckooland race due to exploiting some nasty Rubber-Band A.I.. The fourth (but thankfully optional) race for a Cheato Page makes it even harder by introducing some nasty Fake Difficulty. No matter how fast you go near the end, Mary will always get a quick burst of speed that at least allows her to catch up to you, or in worst case shoot ahead of you, so you have to time your use of speed near the end with absolutely perfection in order to best the last race. This also doubles as a Guide Dang It!, since most players didn't even realize that you aren't supposed to button mash in the later races against her, unlike how you could beat her in Glitter Gulch Mine. Given a very hefty lampshading in Nuts & Bolts courtesy of L.O.G.:
    Remember Canary Mary? Did you have fun racing her? How I laughed when I was setting up those levels. I'm still laughing!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Some think playable Mumbo is underutilized. He is mostly used to open paths for Banjo and Kazooie to get through, and he has no Jiggies to collect besides a single one from the first world, and said Jiggy needs to be obtained by the Golden Goliath he can control rather than Mumbo himself.
  • Mingella and Blobbelda's roles can be summed as rescuing Gruntilda at the very beginning of the game and then participating in the Tower of Tragedy Quiz at the very end (where they get crushed to death no less), thus remaining The Unfought despite the game teasing a potential confrontation against them as well as Gruntilda.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Banjo-Kazooie had a rather elaborate Game Over screen, where Gruntilda succeeds in stealing Tooty's beauty. Tooie's Game Over screen, on the other hand, is nothing but the words "Game Over" in front of a paused screen. We never see Gruntilda's plan to suck out the life force of everything actually work. Especially when Rare is infamous for Game Over Cutscenes that showed the player screwed up big time, like in the other Nintendo 64 platformers developed by them, as well as the Donkey Kong Country trilogy on the SNES and Donkey Kong 64. Though likely this was due to rushed development.
  • According to a Face on a Milk Carton in Cloud Cuckooland's trash can, Tooty is missing. Where is she?
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Wonderwing is barely even used in this game compared to the last game. Enemies run away from it when you activate it, and it doesn't protect you from poison gas. While it is useful for traversing lava and surviving falls, you only really use it once in the entire game to save a Jinjo behind a lavafall.
  • The Wading Boots only appear in three levels and are used like once or twice to navigate dangerous substances and that's it.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Many fans have been quick to point out that, despite it being swirly, the placement of Mr. Patch's inflation cap makes it look like a penis.
• Values Dissonance: While Mumbo is more ethnically vague, Humba is very clearly a stereotypical Native American, complete with a noticeable Tonto Talk. The visual cues already don't age well, but what's worse is that during Tower of Tragedy, Grunty outright calls Humba an Indian in one of her potential questions.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Many players have mistaken Terry as a female, since he gets mad because he thinks you've stolen his eggs, and no gender is immediately given, you'd think that he laid the eggs and is the female. But according to the game's instruction manual, as well as some random dialogue from Zombie Jingaling, Terry's wife has left him, and therefore he is very protective of the eggs.
• The Woobie:
  • King Jingaling. The poor guy loses all of his subjects thanks to a giant tank that runs over part of his kingdom (one entire family of his subjects is killed in this way) and his reward for pointing Banjo and Kazooie in the right direction and giving them a Jiggy is to be zombified.
  • Compared to the last game, Cheato is much more pitiable. Because he had the nerve to assist Banjo and Kazooie, Grunty ends up ripping out a majority of his pages, and unlike Klungo, who spent the last two years trying to free Grunty from her boulder imprisonment, Cheato spent the last two years inside the ruins of Grunty's Lair, alone and forgotten.
• Woolseyism: In Japanese, the Breegull Bash is renamed to Harisen Kazooie, implying as though Banjo is using Kazooie like a paper fan seen in manzai acts. Adding to this, Banjo and Kazooie seem like prime material for a Boke and Tsukkomi Routine to begin with (Banjo being the tsukkomi and Kazooie being the boke).

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